THE LAST SUPPER BEFORE CHAPTER 11: RED LOBSTER SINKS WHILE THE WORLD WATCHES WITH BUTTERED POPCORN By the time the news crawled across my phone at 3 a.m. in a rainswept Istanbul hostel, Red Lobster had already filed for Chapter 11 from the comfort of Orlando—city of theme-park miracles and, apparently, seafood insolvency. Let us…
From the vantage point of a hotel bar in Phnom Penh—where the barman insists on playing 1990s American sitcom theme songs at funeral-parlor volume—the Cubs versus Braves tussle feels less like a ballgame and more like an allegory for late-stage capitalism’s greatest hits. Two franchises, each clutching century-old grievances like passports to self-pity, meet in…
Ashton Kutcher: The Last American Export That Still Works by our correspondent in a café whose Wi-Fi password is literally “password123” PARIS—On the same day the French government announced yet another bailout for baguette artisans, Ashton Kutcher was in Davos explaining to a roomful of unelected technocrats how blockchain can stop child trafficking. Somewhere in…
The Washington Nationals and the Miami Marlins, two baseball franchises whose combined payrolls could bail out a modestly failing European bank, faced off last night in a contest that the global community greeted with the same polite indifference normally reserved for a UN subcommittee on agricultural tariffs. From the Maracanã to the Marina Bay Sands,…
Chang’an: The City That Invented Globalization, Then Got Rebranded By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk If you want to see the birthplace of twenty-first-century supply-chain anxiety, you need to look 1,400 years backward and 8,000 kilometers east of Davos. Welcome to Chang’an—modern-day Xi’an—where cosmopolitan merchants once haggled over bolts of silk and, presumably, complained that the…
ATHENS — The Acropolis did not crumble, the tourists still queued, and the ouzo kept flowing, which is the closest thing the planet has to a miracle these days. A 4.8-magnitude earthquake shook the Greek capital yesterday at 14:13 local time, rattling marble facades and reminding the world that, beneath every cradle of Western civilization,…
The Weeknd Presale: A Global Ritual of FOMO, Firewalls, and Fractured Dreams By Dave’s Locker International Desk The sun never sets on a Weeknd presale. From Manila’s 3 a.m. queues to São Paulo’s lunch-break cyber stampedes, millions synchronize their suffering in the name of Abel Tesfaye’s falsetto. It is less a ticket drop than a…
Royals vs Guardians: How a Pedigreed Pastime Became a Global Power Struggle The phrase “Royals vs Guardians” sounds like the elevator pitch for a Netflix fantasy series—complete with brooding heirs, moody castles, and a CGI dragon voiced by a disgraced Oscar winner. In reality, the drama is unfolding on baseball diamonds from Kansas City to…
Set for Life Results: A Global Lottery of Hope and Despair in Six Numbers By Our Correspondent, Somewhere Between Des Moines and Dar es Salaam Every Friday night, a modest surge of electricity ripples across GMT+0 through GMT+12 as Australia’s Set for Life draws its six polite little digits. The numbers themselves—2, 11, 19, 27,…
Mets vs Phillies: Two Rust-Belt City-States Fight Over a Pastime While the Planet Melts By Ignacio “Nacho” Valdez, International Correspondent, currently hiding from his bar tab in Athens If you squint at the right moment—say, during a 3-2 changeup that dies in the humid Philadelphia night—the Mets-Phillies rivalry starts to look like a low-stakes reenactment…
Raymond Cruz: The Man Who Weaponised Soap By the time the first shipment of Tuco Salamanca’s infamous blue meth reached the docks of Rotterdam, Raymond Cruz had already become a household name in places where subtitles are a way of life. From the favelas of Rio to the rooftop bars of Mumbai, someone is right…
Rupert Murdoch, 93, has announced—again, with the weary inevitability of a Bond villain returning for one last sequel—that he will finally loosen his grip on the Death Star of global media. Or, more accurately, he’ll shuffle sideways into the honorary title of “Chairman Emeritus” of Fox and News Corp while his son Lachlan assumes the…
